Published by Brenthurst Press, Houghton, South Africa, 1990.
Signed by the Author on title page. This book is limited to 1000 copies and this standard edition is one of 850 copies bound in cloth (slate blue).
Book protected by a protective Brodart book cover. Dust jacket in very good condition. Binding tight and secure. Boards are intact, as are the cloth and corners.
Binding Condition: very good, almost unread condition.
Basil le Cordeur (General Editor)
Colour frontispiece and title page, 162 illustrations from Baines' watercolours and sketches, map.
Thomas Baines is well known in southern Africa as a mid nineteenth-century traveller and explorer, artist and diarist. Yet so prolific was he, that despite the large number of books and articles about him and regular exhibitions of his work, many of his water-colour and pencil sketches have never been seen by the general public. In this book are gathered some of the artworks from The Brenthurst Collection relating particularly to the years from 1848 to 1852 which Baines spent in the Eastern Cape.
The sheer visual delight afforded by Baines's pencil and water-colour drawings is the major reason for this publication. The sketches are spontaneous and intimate pieces, and were done to fix in the artist's mind the light which played on the hills, or the architecture of a village, or the posture of a reclining figure. They are integral to Baines's technique as an artist-recorder and are considered in conjunction with the journals he kept of his visits to the Eastern Cape. However, the text is not merely descriptive or annotatory: it places Baines within the context of his time and contributes to an understanding of the artist as a Romantic, an imperialist and a multi-talented man; it also sets the scenes he so deftly sketched, within a modern historical perspective.
In his days, the writings, paintings and adventures of Thomas Baines were overshadowed by those of other travellers and explorers. What Baines had to say in pen and paint appeals to the modern world in a way in which others - so popular in their own time - often do not. A more humble, less self-righteous, and perhaps more contradictory character than some of his leading contemporaries, Baines is today appreciated for capturing with insight the spirit of the Africa that he knew and experienced." (From the fly leaf.)
Brenthurst Press Second Series no 7. Standard edition limited to 850 copies.
This copy is a true investment and a joy to any collection and or artist.
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